The Perils of a Pardon for Joe Arpaio

It would be difficult for President Trump, who has insulted judges and tried to interfere with a federal investigation, to show much more disrespect for the rule of law. But if he makes good on his implicit vow to pardon Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Mr. Trump would be scorning the Constitution itself.

Mr. Arpaio, an anti-immigrant hard-liner who served 24 years in office before voters tossed him out last November, was convicted in July of criminal contempt of court for disregarding a federal judge’s orders to stop detaining people based solely on the suspicion that they were in the country illegally.

Mr. Arpaio’s sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 5. He faces up to six months in prison, unless Mr. Trump gets to him first.

The odds of a presidential intervention seemed to have shot up on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump suggested to the crowd at his bonkers rally in Phoenix that Mr. Arpaio’s conviction was unjust. In response to chants of “Pardon Joe!” Mr. Trump said, “I think he’s going to be just fine, O.K.?” He added, “But I won’t do it tonight, because I don’t want to cause any controversy.”

The Constitution gives the president nearly unlimited power to grant clemency to people convicted of federal offenses, so Mr. Trump can pardon Mr. Arpaio. But Mr. Arpaio was an elected official who defied a federal court’s order that he stop violating people’s constitutional rights. He was found in contempt of that court. By pardoning him, Mr. Trump would show his contempt for the American court system and its only means of enforcing the law, since he would be sending a message to other officials that they may flout court orders also.

Mr. Arpaio could not be less deserving of mercy. In addition to the dragnets of Hispanic-looking people that ultimately led to his contempt conviction, he racked up a record of harassment, neglect, mistreatment and other flagrant abuses of office that should have ended his career years ago.

But he was in power in 2015, when Mr. Trump entered the presidential race. He soon won Mr. Trump’s abiding affection and returned the love, calling Mr. Trump “a great patriot” and supporting him throughout the campaign. (Both also spent years promoting the lie that President Barack Obama was born outside the United States.)

The bromance between “America’s toughest sheriff,” as Mr. Arpaio liked to call himself, and America’s toughest-talking presidential candidate should have surprised no one. Both men built their brands by exploiting racial resentments of white Americans. While Mr. Trump was beginning his revanchist run for the White House on the backs of Mexican “rapists,” Mr. Arpaio was terrorizing brown-skinned people across southern Arizona, sweeping them up in “saturation patrols” and holding them in what he referred to as a “concentration camp” for months at a time.

It was this behavior that a federal judge in 2011 found to be unconstitutional and ordered Mr. Arpaio to stop. He refused, placing himself above the law and the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold.

That alone would be reason enough to deny him a pardon. But a grant of mercy from Mr. Trump would also go against longstanding Justice Department policy, which calls for a waiting period of at least five years before the consideration of a pardon application and some expression of regret or remorse by the applicant. Mr. Arpaio shows no sign of remorse; to the contrary, he sees himself as the victim. “If they can go after me, they can go after anyone in this country,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. He’s right — in a nation based on the rule of law, anyone who ignores a court order, or otherwise breaks the law, may be prosecuted and convicted.

Pardons are by definition political decisions, and presidents of both parties have used them in unsavory ways. What’s remarkable here is that Mr. Trump is weighing mercy for a public official who did not just violate the law, but who remains proud of doing so. The law-and-order president is cheering on an unrepentant lawbreaker. Perhaps that’s because Mr. Arpaio has always represented what Mr. Trump aspires to be: a thuggish autocrat who enforces the law as he pleases, without accountability or personal consequence.